My Mac's OS is now behaving as badly as Windows.

[randomness]

On a daily basis nowadays, the browser I'm using chews up so much memory that it freezes the machine. Or, that's at least the obvious cause. Sometimes it merely freezes the internet connection, so that no application can access the internet.

I think SystemUIserver is implicated in this, but I can't be sure. At any rate, Force Quit in Activity Monitor does nothing. And that's when Activity Monitor responds at all. Sending a kill -9 to the process in question from the terminal window also does nothing.

I'm reduced to power-cycling the machine, in the best old-fashioned Windows 95 way. This is bad enough, but sometimes this causes the icons in the title bar to get trashed, and I have to go through and reset them all.

Needless to say, I am not particularly impressed at the stability of this system.

Comments

[obra.livejournal.com]

Which browser?

[r-ness.livejournal.com]

I've had it happen with Firefox, Safari, and Camino. They all freeze up, sooner or later. Firefox with NoScript lasts the longest. Haven't tried Opera yet.

[dr-memory.livejournal.com]

A somewhat educated stab in the dark:

Flashblock, flashblock, flashblock. There's an extension for Firefox, a preference for Camino, and a bunch of scary inputmanager-based hacks for safari (sigh). But whatever you're using, for the love of god don't let random web pages and pop-unders activate the Flash plugin, or you'll be in a world of hurt.

[muffyjo]

Find your OS disk, boot off of it, select "Disk Utility" and run first aid. It won't hurt, it can help. You might also fix permissions while you're there.

And yeah, make sure you turn off all the plugins for Firefox and Safari. Then turn them on one by one and see what happens next.

[twilight-tea.livejournal.com]

If you notice it gradually getting worse, and spreading to other programs, it could be indicative of hard drive failure. That's how mine started! So yes, run Disk Utility and check the log for pending sectors (forget exactly how to do this from the OS disc, but I'm sure you can Google it!).